1. Technical Field
The present disclosure relates to the technical field of providing and aggregating electronic commerce (“e-commerce”) benefit-conveying codes. More particularly, the present disclosure relates to a system and method of in-context automated delivery of e-commerce benefit-conveying codes during an online transaction.
2. Description of the Related Art
E-commerce companies often use benefit-conveying codes to encourage consumers to purchase specific products or to conduct a transaction on their website. Examples of benefit-conveying codes include coupon codes, discount codes, voucher codes, promotional codes, key codes, and so forth. One form of these benefit-conveying codes is alphanumerical text that can be entered into an input box during a stage or context of an online transaction, such as a shopping cart or a checkout stage on an e-commerce website. For the ease of discussion, hereinafter, Applicant uses “coupon codes” as examples of benefit-conveying codes to discuss issues applicable to benefit-conveying codes as existed in the conventional art. Conventionally, coupon codes can be obtained through e-commerce websites, email newsletters, social media, printed or mailed materials, or through coupon websites or blogs. Consumers often spend considerable amounts of time searching for coupon codes, which often occurs during their checkout process, directly before finalizing an online purchase.
Consumers often elect to utilize a search engine, such as Google®, to search for coupon codes. Most often coupon code directories will be found in these search results. In an attempt to address consumer need for locating coupons, large coupon directory websites, known as coupon aggregator websites, such as RetailMeNot® have attempted to aggregate and list valid coupons for many e-commerce websites across the Internet. While aggregator coupon websites enhance the consumer's ability to find all coupons in one location, the consumer may still encounter numerous obstacles in the process of locating a useful and relevant coupon code.
First, a conventional coupon aggregator system does not usually closely work with or become incorporated into an e-commerce website to realize in-context automated delivery of coupon codes. As a result, a user (consumer) using a coupon aggregator system, upon visiting an e-commerce website, has to pause the user's contemporaneous e-commerce transaction while attempting to search and find coupon codes through the coupon aggregator system. Furthermore, even if locating one or more coupon codes through the coupon aggregator system, the consumer must either memorize or manually enter, or copy and paste, the code into a coupon input box during the shopping cart or checkout phase. This sequence of laboring of the user (away from the e-commerce website) not only greatly inconveniences and frustrates the user, but also in turn reduces the attraction of the coupon aggregator system to the user as a coupon code provider, thus hurting the business of coupon aggregator system built on providing coupon codes.
Next, a conventional coupon aggregator system, even if working closely with or incorporating into an e-commerce website, does not usually only provide coupon codes that have been checked to be reasonably relevant to the contemporaneous purchases (or, in other words, the current order) of a user in a shopping cart of an e-commerce website. Thus, even if the coupon aggregator system is able to provide a long list of coupon codes, the long list only aggravates the user's inconvenience and frustration when the user has to apply one coupon code after another only to realize that the applied coupon codes are not relevant to the user's contemporaneous purchases. This issue also hurts the business of coupon aggregator system built on providing coupon codes.
Further, two constant challenges of a coupon aggregator system are timely expanding its coupon code coverage to newly established e-commerce websites and timely updating and refreshing its coupon code collection of an e-commerce website. If a coupon aggregator system does not have effective means to timely expand coverage to e-commerce websites, the coupon aggregator system may very quickly lose its appeal to potential users. Since an e-commerce website can quickly roll out new coupon codes and render older coupon codes out-of-date, if a coupon aggregator system cannot timely update and refresh its coupon code collection of an e-commerce website to reflect changes or updates in coupon codes made by the e-commerce website, the coupon aggregator system may end up only providing users with out-of-date coupon codes. A conventional coupon aggregator system, on the other hand, does not have automated means to address both challenges based on user e-commerce activities or feedbacks, thus resulting in being unable to meet either challenge.
Therefore, there is a need to address some or all of the above-noted issues that conventional coupon aggregator systems are not able to effectively address.